The Legend of Good Women

Chaucer · c. 1387 CE · Poem · English · Medieval

The god of Love finds the poet asleep in a meadow among daisies and charges him with slander: he has written a faithless woman and translated a poem against love. A queen intercedes and sets the penance — a book of women who kept faith and the men who broke it — and Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Lucrece, Ariadne and Philomela follow in turn. Chaucer modelled the sequence on Ovid, abandoned it after nine, and left behind the first sustained use of the decasyllabic couplet in English.

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Lineage

• modeled on ↑ Heroides
  Ovid · c. 15 BCE · Poem
• influenced by ↑ Metamorphoses
  Ovid · 8 CE · Poem
• alludes to ↑ The Romance of the Rose
  Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun · c. 1275 CE · Poem

Attributes

Closest analogues

• Il Filostrato
  Giovanni Boccaccio · c. 1335 CE · Poem

  61% · 15 shared
  PoemRomanceTragedyLoveBetrayalLoyaltySuffering & EnduranceMedievalDoomed LoversLoverThe Lettervs Personvs Fate / GodsElegiacTragic
• Troilus and Criseyde
  Chaucer · c. 1385 CE · Poem

  56% · 15 shared
  PoemRomanceTragedyLoveBetrayalLoyaltyMedievalDoomed LoversLoverThe Lettervs Personvs Fate / GodsTragicIronicEnglish
• The Two Noble Kinsmen
  Shakespeare & Fletcher · c. 1613 CE · Play

  51% · 12 shared
  RomanceLoveBetrayalLoyaltyDoomed LoversLoverFlowersvs Personvs Fate / GodsTragicIronicEnglish
• Sylvia's Lovers
  Elizabeth Gaskell · 1863 CE · Novel

  48% · 11 shared
  RomanceTragedyLoveBetrayalLoyaltyHeroineDoomed Loversvs PersonElegiacTragicEnglish
• Laxdaela Saga
  Anonymous · c. 1250 CE · Novel

  47% · 11 shared
  RomanceTragedyLoveBetrayalLoyaltyMedievalHeroineDoomed Loversvs PersonElegiacTragic
• The Tale of Chunhyang
  Anonymous · c. 1750 CE · Novel

  46% · 9 shared
  RomanceLoveLoyaltySuffering & EnduranceHeroineDoomed LoversLoverFlowersvs Person